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Multi Parties
Born from a desire to be able to expose more facets of a setting than just one hero party could viably get to see in the course of their adventure, we invented the technique of Multi-Partying. This is having not one, but two (or more) hero parties run around the same (or nearby) setting(s), alternatingly getting played for a bit before we would switch to the other party again. In one example, the first party was a troupe of human city watchmen and the other one was a clique of demons invading the material world via host bodies. Both parties had their own agendas and goals, and got involved with the same bigger plot - albeit on vastly different sides of it. This (and similar experiments) allowed the GM to portray much more of the world, its inhabitants, the unfolding plot, and the mood and themes of that particular story, than would have been possible with only one party. For example, there was a major villain in this story, who the city watchmen never met however. Only the demons interacted with this character, but the players thus knew (of) him and it enriched everyone's enjoyment of the campaign as a whole. By now, Multi-Partying has become a staple technique for us. In all our longer-running chronicle, there is more than one "hero party". For example, our V:tM master placed both a coterie of three Brujah and a coven of three Tremere (all relatively recently embraced, the Tremere maybe having one year headstart or so) in the same city, both groups to be played by the same three players. It allowed (and continues to allow) exposition far beyond anything previously possible! Perhaps V:tM is a game that especially profits from this technique... but we found that it works in all kinds of games - provided that they're not too crunch-heavy (since that does generally not mesh well with multiple characters, period.) Our Werewolf: the Apocalypse master saw this, found it good, and used something similar for his own chronicle. In this game, werewolves can be born from human parents, wolf stock, or be a metis (a werewolf-werewolf offspring, wretched abominations of nature because they are cursed rejects of Gaia). Our GM decided to introduce one player-character of each type for every player in that game, in order to illustrate the Werewolf setting more completely. (Normally, you might maybe have one lupus and one metis in a group of four players, and there would be a little bit of exposition and maybe actual gametime spent on that, but comparatively little usually comes from it.) In this game, that led to an entire group of humans (bikers in the same gang), a pack of wolves, and a bunch of solitary metis children, all being played by the same four players, all experiencing their own separate introduction stories and plot hooks, and only slowly getting pulled (/ choosing to move) towards the main plot to which they are all somehow connected... Of course, this chronicle is being played with a Cast of Thousands, as well, so you might want to refer to that also, if you're interested in doing something like this, too. (The solitary metis characters each had various player-controlled NPCs in their environment / peer group, allowing all players to fully enjoy all the preludes and side stories together.) . When to do this: * when you have a complex setting or chronicle setpiece that you wanna exhibit various sides of (a royal court, a civil war, an obscure supernatural occurrence) * when vastly different types of player options exist (very many classes, archetypes, clans, tribes...) and you want to explore more of them than there are players present * when your Prep or Direction calls for a very homogenous party (consider establishing a second party to add diversity and viewpoints) * . When not to do this: * very heterogenous parties can make the need for this obsolete, especially if you Have Them Play Side Chars. An exception would be if you were to contrast a very homogenous party with it, by using this technique * in very focussed games (often Indie productions), where everyone plays mostly the same anyways (DitV, Mouse Guard, MLwM...), this is often uncalled for, and sometimes downright impossible * When you want to avoid adding additional viewpoints for any one the usual reasons (given here), such as when everone in the setting is in the know about something the playercharacters don't know ("the Matrix" style settings, where reality is a lie but no one knows it), or when otherwise wanting to carefully control how much of the setting you exhibit to the players at which point (V:tM in "freshly embraced" mode, "starting at level zero" D&D playstyles, the whole idea behind "Earthdawn", etc.) . .